Advancing Youth in Politics

As a three year debating veteran, I have had the chance to see many young adults (and, frankly, kids) stand up and get involved in politics and public speaking. There may be a larger number of young adults and teens standing up and getting involved, but this isn’t enough… and how they are getting involved is not the right way. I have said it a million times, and once more here, if you do something good - but for the wrong reasons, it is not a good thing.

I have made countless speeches at different youth group events, and at political club meetings, and the differences in how my audience responds is completely different. While speaking at a youth group, and endorsing Mike Huckabee, many of the kids and teens were turned off to him (this is at a church mind you, he should be a popular guy there), because he “was a republican”. I thought this was silly, it shouldn’t matter if you are a republican, or a democrat; a liberal, or a conservative. Every candidate loves the country and if they hold the same values you hold you should support that. After pulling a few randomly selected kids aside while they were doing their activities I had asked them a few questions to get a feel for their political compass (as I highly doubted these were all hard left liberals). I always carry with me to these events where the candidates stood on issues, and some of the speeches they make, and after talking to them I read off a few of the quotes one of the candidates made without telling them who it was, and asked them: Is this a person you support? Many times they had selected someone OTHER THAN who they said they supported in the beginning.

After talking to each student about who they had chose as their candidate they supported, I asked them if they had heard of this candidate before, and why they support everything (or much of) what this candidate supports but cheer for another candidate. When this was confronted to them, they typically fell back to the truthful answer which was:

“Well such and such band was endorsing them, and I really like them”

or

“My friends all said the other guy sucked”

even

“I can’t support this guy because he is a Muslim”

There are so many responses that I get at this point that I can’t list them all but those were the major ones. I didn’t care who they picked my goal isn’t to tell them to vote for a certain candidate, many can’t vote anyway… I simply wanted them to get them selfs involved in politics.

When you go to club meetings the atmosphere is entirely different; we are having lunch or breakfast and there is a bunch of (typically) old people in a room wearing pins and buttons of whoever or for whatever, and these people typically know what they support and why they support it. So telling them viewpoints that are not that of something they are used to hearing usually gets them up in arms (telling the republicans that I don’t support book banning was one such instance). However, they do agree with me that young people must be more involved.

This is issue is not only important to the republicans who seem to typically have an issue getting teens and young adults interested in what they are doing, but to the democrats who typically do their recruiting by “brainwash” and “bells and whistles” which is a good strategy in the beginning but its also why they lose many democrats after they grow up a bit. Both sides need to care less about what party young people join, and who they support and get up and say “Hey, how are you… lets find out if you are a republican or a democrat or somewhere in between and help you find your own way in politics” and not pressure them one way or another.